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[Jun. 30th, 2008|09:43 am] |
Had the calmest and lowest-key birthday ever--except for the shark-filled nightmares--which for me is really the best I can hope for. Really, anything that doesn't reach the level of misery that was my 21st is fine.
Bidding for ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) livelongnmarry starts tomorrow! I am neither buying or selling, due to lack of money for the former and lack of any sort of skill to offer for the latter, but that's no reason why everyone else shouldn't go spend lots of $.
My father and I wandering into an argument a civilized debate about the current quality of writing in the world. He said that there was less good writing than there used to be, which for some reason rubbed me the wrong way, so I pointed out that, among other things, 1) once you get past spelling, grammar, and general plot and character mechanics, 'good' is mostly subjective and 2) there was plenty of trash and badly-written prose fifty/one hundred/two hundred years ago, and the average person just doesn't run into it these days because it's been consigned to the dustbins of history. (Mostly.)
Then he said that what he'd meant was that people weren't as good at communicating through writing as the once were, and I said that wasn't the same as what he'd originally stated, and we probably would have gone another ten rounds over intellgence of writing vs. intelligence of readers but my mother distracted us both with cake.
After all that, though, I'm not sure that he doesn't have a point, at least about writing being worse these days. When I got home I sat down to start a Book That Shall Remain Nameless which had received all sorts of good reviews. Before the evening was over had to set aside to be tossed, because within the first fifty pages ran smack into painful dialogue, half a chapter of infodump, and a 'protagonist' I wanted to kick in the face for being a skeevy jerk. And I paid money for it, too! *sulk* |
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